Equivocate
by Marz1
Summary: Matt Murdock saves people all the time. They usually don't send people after him to repay him. Repayment is usually not in the form of a new bossy roommate.
1. Creep

**Summary** : Matt Murdock saves people all the time. They usually don't send people after him to repay him. Repayment is usually not in the form of a new bossy roommate.

 **Disclaimer** : Marvel owns the characters, Disney owns Marvel.

 **Spoilers** for Daredevil seasons 1 and 2 and the M.C.U movies up to Captain America: Civil War. There may be mentions of general information from Agents of Shield, but they aren't part of this plot.

 **Rated** T for violence and language typical of the Daredevil tv show.

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 **Equivocate**

 **By Marz1**

 **Chapter 1: Creep**

 **Verb** : to go very slowly _,_ to go timidly or cautiously so as to escape notice, to enter or advance gradually so as to be almost unnoticed

 **Noun** : a strange person who you strongly dislike

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It would take an unusual person to enjoy crawling through a sewer. Matthew Murdock was not that unusual, or at least that kind of unusual. Matt was the vigilante defender of Hell's Kitchen. He took that duty seriously, though it had cost him his job and his friends, and almost everything else in his life.

He thought he knew all the ins and outs of Hell's Kitchen. A cult of very quiet ninja called the Hand had proved him wrong, using the sewers, rail lines, and electrical access tunnels to hide from him. He had had years to search the sewers, to add them to the mental map he kept of the neighborhood he considered his to protect. He had left it until it was too late.

He wondered if it was some kind of cognitive dissonance. He usually ran across the roof tops to avoid notice, but he knew the sewers were an equally good way to get around. He knew deep down it was the smell; the ammonia reek and the buildup of centuries of waste from humans, rats, and roaches. He had to push past that and make up for it now. He thought of Elektra, cold under the earth, and knew he didn't deserve better.

On the first day of exploring the sewers, he made the mistake of wearing the Daredevil suit. Matt was aware of the stench sinking into his armor, but he had under estimated a normal human's sense of smell. That night on patrol a mugger mistakenly assumed his would be victim had soiled himself in terror, and mocked the old man about it before Matt leapt from behind a parked car and broke the mugger's nose. The next day Matt wore a set of ragged denim pants and an army surplus jacket, which he left on the roof of his apartment building at night, to air out as much as possible.

To hide his identity Matt wrapped a scarf around his mouth and nose. He left the upper half of his face exposed to keep track of air currents and temperature changes. Though his eyes were useless, his eyelids and lashes were sensitive enough to make up for covering his nose.

Matt had already given up on finding his way by smell for the most part. The airflow through the tunnels was often confusing, pushed by distant links to the subway, hot fetid air rising above rotting things and mixing with cold brine from the Hudson that slowly dripped through ancient brick walls. Every once in a while there would be an overpowering blast of chlorine or something equally abrasive, as illegally dumped chemicals found their way to a new catalyst. The scarf also served as a slight filter for the fetid air.

The new old clothing helped him blend in with the other tunnel residents as well. A few times he crossed paths with city workers at unexpected intersections, where the walls didn't carry echoes like he expected them to. They thought he was just another homeless derelict. They either ignored him or chased him so slowly and loudly that it was obvious they didn't want to catch him.

The actual tunnel residents were a bit more difficult to fool. Most of them were not particularly friendly and a few were violently territorial. Matt supposed he was arrogant to think because he was always blind, he would automatically have the advantage in a lightless environment, but several near-misses with knives and rebar had humbled him.

He did find tunnel people who were willing to talk to him about the Hand, and a few of them even told the truth. The cult had killed at least 10 tunnel residents and driven the rest into other parts of the tunnels, which extended far outside Hell's Kitchen. People had only just started to return. Matt prioritized making it safe for them, since no one wanted his help as lawyer anymore. At least he could make sure the tunnels were free of booby traps and giant iron urns full of blood.

To check for traps, Matt added a broom handle to his exploration kit. He used it to tap suspicious bits of ground and to check the depth of any liquid he might be forced to step in. Though the broom handle wasn't as versatile as the batons Melvin had made for him, it was much easier to replace. If it fell into a pool of sewage, he'd spend the $12 to buy a new one.

Matt was poking around inside a pipe when he noticed them. The pipe was large enough to crawl through, but it sounded brittle. Rust flaked off like snow and fell all over his head and shoulders as he leaned into it. He was trying to focus on the vibrations in the metal when stomping boots broke his concentration. They weren't close, but they weren't hard to zero in on.

At first he thought it was a S.W.A.T.. team. He heard the rattle of weapons and buckles, creaking nylon and plastic, thick cloth sliding against armored vests, and combat boots. Matt couldn't think of why a swat team would be down in the sewers. They were moving through part of the tunnels he had explored before; a series of storm drains that linked to the Hudson.

He back tracked and then climbed up a crumbling vertical shaft, part of an ancient cistern jammed between the steel roots of a skyscraper. He had to run parallel to the armed group for a few hundred feet before another vertical shaft, a more purposely built spillway, would allow him close. He heard their boots echo through an intersecting horizontal tunnel above, and climbed.

He braced himself just below the top of the spillway, most of his weight was on his splayed legs. His hands rested on the floor of the tunnel above, feeling the vibration of the men's boots through the concrete. He had gotten ahead of them, more through luck than planning. He was close enough now to differentiate their approaching heartbeats, nine loud even rhythms almost drowning out the light frightened flutter of a child's. The child was being carried, since his or her feet never brushed the tunnel floor.

He heard the buzz of the men's radios, throat mikes and earpieces, instead of hand held sets. Eight of them spoke to each other, but no other voices answered or interrupted, so he assumed they weren't in contact with the surface.

 _"—approaching the next fork,"_

 _"Hang a left."_

 _"The woman's flagging. Should I take the kid?"_

" _Negative. Do not interact with the asset."_

"Please turn on the light," the child asked, their voice carrying loudly above the radio sets.

"Quiet," one of the men ordered.

Another heart sped up, a beat Matt hadn't noted until it started to change.

"Lila, be quiet," a woman's voice echoed.

"Mom-"

"Please be quiet," she said. Matt could hear her desperation now.

Matt pushed his face against his shoulder, shoving his scarf down below his chin. Over the normal putrid smells he detected fresh blood. He thought he had the guilty sorted from the innocent. He pulled his hands back and shimmied further down in the spillway. His legs shook a little from the strain as he waited, hunched, for the group to pass by.

Different scents poured off them, as they passed the spillway: solvent and polish from their guns, jet fuel and gasoline, cheap deodorant in five flavors, losing against ten different body odors. The woman smelled faintly of horses and goats and bits of hay and alfalfa deep in the soles of her boots. The child smelled like sugary cereal, crayons, alcohol, iodine, and a dozen other hospital cleansers.

The men were not spread out far enough for him to pick them off easily. Three walked at the front of the group in a wedge, two walked on either side of the woman and child, and three walked at the back, again as a wedge, with two next to each other and one ahead. Their helmets rasped against buzz-cut scalps.

He heard a faint whirring sound that he at first thought were auto-focusing camera lenses. After a moment's thought he concluded that he was hearing night-vision goggles, since the sound only came from around the eight armed men's faces.

Hiding was always a challenge for him, since he did not know how much other people could see. Since the child had complained about the dark, it was likely the men were depending on their goggles, and leaving their prisoners basically blind. Night-vision goggles required some illumination to start with. Matt assumed the men had some kind of light turned on, maybe something on their gun sights, since he heard the barrels of their rifles cutting back and forth through the air as they walked by. None of them paused by his spillway.

Though he would describe the overlapping networks of pipes and tunnels as labyrinthine, there were a lot of places where the tunnels were long and straight, with no place to hide for hundreds of feet. Charging through those, towards multiple projectile weapons, would be suicide. Ricochets were another major problem. The tunnel walls were filled with little chips and dents and angles that made guessing where a bullet would fly nearly impossible. The deafening reverberations of gunfire wouldn't be too helpful either.

A few strategies flickered through his mind. He could pick them off one at a time as they moved past connecting tunnels, but they were talking back and forth on their radios, and would probably clue in quickly even if he did knock each man out before he could get noisy. The sudden silence would give the missing man away. For that plan to work, he would also have to keep finding and moving to connecting tunnels, which were not unlimited. He could simply follow them to wherever they were going and hope the conditions there were better, but that was probably just as risky as the next option, a blitz attack. The Devil in him cheered at the thought of sudden merciless violence.

Matt bit his lip, trying to focus and not let the red pulsing excitement overwhelm him. The goal here and now was not to beat down as many heavily armed men as possible, it was to save the woman and child from them. He let out a slow silent breath, and dropped back down the spillway.

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Laura Barton couldn't tell how long they had been walking, but her arms ached. Lila seemed to gain another pound with every new tunnel they passed through, but she couldn't risk putting her down. She hoped Lila wouldn't start whining again, since one of their captors had shot Laura in the arm to put an end to the first tantrum. It was only a graze but it was surprisingly painful. Despite the pain Laura was tempted to start asking "Are we there yet?".

A month ago, Laura had noticed her daughter Lila rubbing her fist in her left eye, and had sent up a prayer that she wasn't about to have three children stuck at home with pinkeye. After five different consultations with specialist she was given the diagnosis and Laura was swept through with guilt, though she knew pinkeye hadn't magically become cancer because of an ill-timed prayer.

She tried to keep Clint in the loop. She sent him a series of emails that had flown off into heavily-encrypted space. He was being hunted by the people he had served with, so the old channels weren't safe. He finally responded, but not with "I will come home and hold my daughter while we tell her that her eye has to come out". Instead she received a single line; "Stark will get you access to the Cradle."

She didn't trust that machine, and she bore a grudge against the billionaire who controlled it, but she couldn't stop herself from hoping. The Cradle had saved Clint from what might have been a crippling injury once, maybe it could fix an eye as well. Clint made the arrangements over the next few days, through emails that were brisk and business like, but contained all the right code words.

She found a sitter for Cooper and Nat, and made copies of all the medical paperwork. She knew Clint couldn't join them in New York. It could still be a trap. Though none of the current Avengers would use a sick child as bait, she knew General Ross had not forgotten the jail break from the Raft.

Lila was already tired and cranky that morning, when they boarded their plane. She had caught on weeks ago that something bad was happening, even if Laura and the doctors hadn't given her all the details. Lila used to beg to go with Clint to New York. Most of the flight she spent claiming she felt fine now, and wanted to go home.

Natasha had not been waiting for them at the airport as planned. Laura wished she had turned right around then, but Natasha was often delayed by missions. Instead Laura bought tickets for a shuttle bus to Midtown. A man with a gun boarded a few steps behind her, and they ended up in a random parking garage instead of outside their hotel. More armed men were waiting, and she and Lila were searched, bound at the wrists with zip-ties, and marched down a staircase into the sewers.

The men hadn't told her where they were going. They hadn't said what they wanted either. No over-the-top villain with a bad mustache had cackled that her husband would have to kill the president if he wanted to see her alive again, or any other dramatic nonsense. They just told her to walk, and gave her rough shoves when she got disoriented, and bumped against them in the dark.

She frowned. For all she knew these men could be working for the president. She wished for the thousandth time that Steve Rogers had never called for help, or that Clint had told him no. Steve knew just how to ask though. He didn't appeal to high-minded ideals, didn't give a speech about the draconian Sokovia accords. He just asked Clint, in a slightly desperate voice, to help his save his friend who was the victim of mind control. She hoped Steve and whoever else they recruited would help return the favor now.

"To the left," the man said, pushing her right shoulder with the barrel of his rifle. She had the sudden urge to sing a few lines of that Beyonce song, and knew the stress was getting to her. Her right foot banged against something and she started to step over it. A hand grabbed her shoulder and shoved her harder to the right.

"It's a hole," the man growled, now behind her. "Keep left."

"She can't see," Lila said in her defense.

"Shut up, kid," the man growled.

"You should turn on the lights," Lila whined. "It's too dark!"

Laura wanted to put her hand over Lila's mouth, but she couldn't do that without dropping her. Something thumped behind them, and she tensed, thinking one of the men was pushing his way towards them, maybe the one who shot her. There was another thump and then arms wrapped around her. Lila was crushed between her and another body. Lila screamed. She nearly did too as grasping hands slid into her right armpit and down under her right thigh. Lila's screaming got louder as the man grabbing Laura lifted them off the ground.

"No!" Laura shouted trying to pull away.

She kicked her legs, trying to get loose, but the man was a lot stronger. His knees knocked against her shins as he bent and then launched them out into space.

As they fell, she screamed.

The sound had barely left her mouth when they hit the ground. They landed on top of the man, but he was rolling with the fall, and they ended up squashed under his body. The man grunted in her ear, and she thought it sounded pained. He got off of them and shoved his hands into her armpits, hauling her to her feet. She overbalanced and nearly dropped Lila, but her daughter's weight shifted, and she stayed upright.

"Mom!" Lila shouted.

She realized the man's hands were on her daughter and she tried to pull her away, but her wrists were tied together and she couldn't get a grip on her.

"No! No!" she screamed as the man pulled Lila out of her arms.

Gun fire rattled around them and light flashed from above. For a second she saw an outline of the man, with Lila over his shoulder, and then everything was black again. The man grabbed her arm and dragged her into a stumbling run. They moved away from the hole they had dropped through, around one bend and then another.

"Kid!" the man hissed, barely audible over Lila's wailing. "Kid, please be quiet!"

Laura wasn't won over by manners. She knew a perfectly civil conversation could end with a bullet in one party's head. Still, the man seemed like the lesser of two evils.

"Lila!" she hissed, shaking badly but less panicked. "Lila, be quiet! He's helping us. We're going home."

She hoped she was telling the truth as she was dragged around another sharp turn and then jerked to a stop.

"It's a short drop," the man said. "Tuck and roll, and keep rolling so I don't land on you."

Her yelp of protest was cut off by a shove and then she was falling again. Her knees jarred as she landed, and she fell over backwards, slamming her head against the ground. Bright stars erupted out of the dark. She heard feet shuffle and little yelp from Lila and then the man was pulling her to her feet again. Instead of hauling her into motion, his large hands wrapped around her head. His fingers pushed through her hair. She tried to push him away.

"Ma'am, where are you hurt?" he asked.

"Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?" Lila asked, over and over in the background.

"It's just a bump," she whispered, though her eyes teared up from the sting as his fingers found the wound.

The man let go, and stepped back. She was glad he wasn't crowding her, but she was immediately lost in the featureless black of the tunnel.

"Mom?" Lila asked, her voice floating up from the dark to her right.

"I'm fine, honey," she said. She stretched out her bound hands, trying to find her daughter. The man's hand found hers and guided it to Lila's shoulder.

"Stay here and stay quiet," the man said. "I'll find something to cut these off."

Before she could object he was gone. She thought she might've heard the scuff of a boot, but nothing as clear as retreating footsteps. There was just a little scuff sound and then he was gone. She knelt down and looped her arms around Lila, because she couldn't think of anything else to do.

"Mom?" Lila asked.

"Shhhh," she said.

She thought about trying to get away, but she would only get them more lost. They'd fall or they'd starve or they would run into the armed men they were running from. They would have to wait for their rescuer to come back.

Their rescuer, what did she know about him? Male, strong, polite, somehow able to see in the dark. She thought if he knew Clint he would have said, but she wasn't certain about that. Clint knew a lot of strange people.

"Ma'am?"

She clenched her jaw to keep from yelping. Lila squeaked as Laura's arms reflexively tightened around her.

"Ma'am, I found something sharp. Hold still and I'll get those zip-ties off you, ok?"

"Ok," she whispered.

His hands found hers, still looped around Lila. Callused fingers brushed along her wrists and then pulled at the strips of plastic. She felt one snap and then the other, but kept her arms around Lila.

"Kid, I'm going to cut you loose, ok?" the man asked.

"Do you have light?" Lila asked.

"Sorry kid, I don't need one, so I don't carry one. You and your mom will be outside soon though. Give me your hands ok?"

It took a little more cajoling for Lila to agree to be freed, but the man didn't get impatient. Laura hoped that meant the armed men were not nearby, but they didn't seem to have come very far.

"I'm Laura," She said, recalling Clint's lectures on survival in captivity. Humanizing your self was supposed to help. She hadn't risked it with the soldiers who took them, but they already knew who she was. "This is my daughter, Lila. Thank you for saving us."

"Thank you sir," Lila said, after Laura poked her in the shoulder.

The man's feet shuffled awkwardly. She worried it was guilt for a moment, and that he could be involved in this somehow.

"You're welcome. You can call me Mike."

"It's nice to meet you Mike," Laura said. "Did my husband send you to rescue us?"

"No ma'am," he said. "I don't know who he is. I was already down here and heard you and those men passing by. They seemed…suspicious."

She wondered if he was waiting for her to elaborate on her circumstances. She wasn't particularly eager to, since Mike seemed rather suspicious himself. He probably wasn't a plumber or anyone whose job would require him to be down here, but he didn't give off a deranged-hobo vibe either. She wondered if he was an altered human fleeing from prosecution under the Accords or hiding from the various governments and criminal organizations hunting people on the leaked Shield Index.

"Are we very far underground?" Laura asked.

"About 6 stories down," Mike said. "We shouldn't go straight up from here though, since we'd come out by the docks and that isn't the best neighborhood, even in broad daylight. Do you have somewhere to go?"

"I'm not sure where would be safe," she said.

"I can bring you up by the 15th precinct," Mike said. "Detective Mahoney is a good cop. Ask for him. He can probably help you sort out the legal side of whatever this is."

She wasn't sure that was true, but she didn't want to push her luck by asking too much of a stranger. She wasn't sure who was behind the kidnapping; mercenaries who wanted Clint to do a job for them, General Ross' goon squad, some power play by a rogue nation. A police station was probably her best bet at the moment, since she did not know where Tony Stark stood. The invitation to use the Cradle could have been intercepted or entirely fake.

"Ok. Sounds good," she said, squeezing Lila again.

Lila squirmed, but Laura was shivering, so Lila must be freezing. Her arms shook as she tried to lift her, though it should have been an easy task now that her arms were free. She started badly when Mike's hand came down on her shoulder.

"I think you're a little bit in shock, Laura," Mike said. "The wound in your arm isn't very deep, but that bump on your head and the stress add up. You wear my coat and hang onto my arm, and I'll carry Lila, Ok?"

"Alright," she said, and he helped her get her arms into the sleeves. The garment held the odor of an unfamiliar body, mostly lost under the stench of their surroundings.

She reached out and found Mike's arm. He had a long sleeved flannel shirt on, but she could easily feel ropy muscle under it. His biceps weren't equal to Clint's, but she'd have no chance in a physical fight, even if she could see. Lila managed to kick her in the elbow as Mike picked her up on his other side. It probably wasn't worth it to mention caution and manners. Or maybe it was.

"You're prickly," Lila said. "You need to shave more or less."

"I've been told that before," Mike said. Laura thought she heard a smile in his voice.

There was a soft rasping sound, and Laura could imagine little hands running over stubble.

"Lila!" she hissed. "You don't grab at someone's face!"

"I'm not," she lied. "I'm finding a good spot to hang on."

She could feel Mike's ribs shiver against her arm in a repressed laugh.

"My nose is not a good spot," Mike said.

Lila gave a betrayed little huff, but settled as they started walking.

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 **Author's Note:** Reviews regarding this story are appreciated, random demands to work on a different story are not. Plot bunnies happen people.


	2. Deed

**Warning!** There is some swearing in this chapter! And it isn't even obstructed by x's and random punctuation symbols.

 **Equivocate**

 **By Marz1**

 **Chapter 2: Deed**

Noun:

1\. a signed and usually sealed instrument containing some legal transfer, bargain, or contract

2\. something that is done, usually an illustrious act or action

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Tony Stark leaned into the three-dimensional rendering of his new shielded arc reactor, making small adjustments with a stylus. The new design was only about half as powerful as the iteration he currently used in his Iron Man suit, but if it worked out as planned, it would be completely invisible to heat and E.M. detectors. He was changing the angle on a reflector plate when Vision's big red-and-yellow face appeared only inches from his own.

Tony stumbled back out of the 3D projection field and tripped over a cord. His windmilling arms sent his mug of Alka-Seltzer flying across the room. After a moment, Tony realized Vision had added his image to the 3D projection, rather than just popping up out of the floor as he was wont to do.

For a being that claimed to be logical and driven by reason, Vision had a propensity for entering conversations via jump-scare. Tony thought it was statistically impossible for all of these encounters to be accidental. Could he mathematically prove he was being pranked by the android? Vision's voice derailed that train of thought, cutting off the chorus of Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."

"Laura and Lila Barton have been kidnapped," he announced gravely.

"Who?" Tony asked, trying to keep his roiling stomach under control as his brain changed tasks.

"Clint Barton's wife and daughter," Vision said.

"Were they taken from their farm?" Tony asked, trying to recall how many kids had been there while the Avengers were hiding from Ultron. There was definitely more than one.

"No," Vision said. "The NYPD has just put in a request for information on them. They were taken at gunpoint from a shuttle bus by armed mercenaries. The last sighting of them was at 15:28 EST, at a parking garage at W 57th and 6th. I have taken the liberty of tracing Laura Barton's recent travel and communications. She was lured to New York under false pretenses, after emails to her husband were intercepted and decrypted."

"She was meeting Barton in New York?" Tony said. "Ballsy."

"She was led to believe that you would allow Lila Barton access to the Cradle to treat her cancer," Vision said, forwarding the hacked documents to Tony's 3D work display.

"Double fuck," Tony said.

The little girl had intraocular medulloepithelioma, and the treatment was basically to take the whole eye out before the cancer could spread. The Cradle might have been able to pull off the fiddly microsurgery required to remove the cancer and preserve the kid's eye, but the original Cradle had been destroyed when Thor used lightning to jumpstart Vision.

Dr. Helen Cho was working on a new machine, but it would be months if not years before it was built. Cho was slowed down not only by the injuries she'd received from Ultron, but also by Tony's demands that the new machine either regenerate or replicate nerves. Everyone involved in the project knew Tony meant for Rhodey to be the new Cradle's first customer.

Tony looked at the clock and scrubbed at his face. It was just past 5 o'clock. Laura and the kid might be out of the city by now. "Have we picked up any ransom demands for them?" Tony asked.

"No," Vision said. "But it is unlikely they would be communicated to us. Clint Barton's fugitive status is a matter of public record."

That also meant they could not use Avenger resources to find them, at least not without United Nations approval. Tony supposed they might be able to get permission if they sold the mission as a plan to steal bait for their own Clint-Barton-catching trap, but the lives of two people wouldn't jump this problem to the top of the approval committee's schedule.

Tony brought up the search programs he'd tasked with finding Clint and the other rogue Avengers. The man had last been seen in Italy three weeks ago, poking around an old Hydra safe-house. He thought of the burner phone Steve Rogers had mailed to him. He could put the ball in Steve's court, but that led to a whole host of other problems, the first being that if Steve did show up in New York, Tony was obligated to arrest him.

Tony activated the locator beacons that all the active-duty Avengers were now required to carry. Vision was still upstate at the Avengers' training compound. Rhodey was in Washington. Natasha's beacon failed to activate, and an error message appeared on the screen. It was just as well, since Natasha was in the Ukraine defending a politician from a "totally not Russian" assassin.

Honestly, Tony did not want to let Natasha know at all. She had somehow skated charges of treason after tazing prince T'Challa at a German airport, and Tony knew it wasn't for his sake that she had jumped through all the political hoops required to stick around. If this kidnapping, hostage situation, whatever it was, required her to betray the Avengers to save Barton's family, she'd do it in a heartbeat.

"I have located Laura and Lila Barton," Vision announced, cutting through Tony's downward spiral.

"What?" Tony asked.

Vision's face was replaced by security camera footage of Laura Barton, her daughter Lila, and an unknown man with a scarf wrapped around his entire head. They were walking down 10th street. Tony had been expecting to see the Bartons suspended over a tank of sharks or lava or something. There wasn't even a gun visible on the screen.

"Is this real time?" Tony asked.

"Yes," Vision said.

The view jumped to a camera across the street from the 15th precinct police station. Laura and Lila came around a building at the corner of the block. The man in the scarf was gone. The Barton women walked up the steps and entered the police station. They looked rumpled but unharmed.

"The cameras inside the station are not remotely accessible," Vision said.

"Do we have eyes on the scarf guy?" Tony asked.

"No, he has moved out of the range of the cameras I have access to. I cannot locate him." Vision said. "His body type and gait do not match any of the rogue Avengers," Vision added, anticipating Tony's next question.

Tony adjusted the satellite he usually tasked with monitoring Avengers Tower. Its cameras now focused on the 15th precinct. His A.I., Friday, would give him a heads-up if anything suspicious happened in the vicinity.

"Ok," Tony said. "That was 10 minutes well spent. They're rescued. They're under police protection. I should probably still do…something."

"Perhaps you should inform Secretary Ross," Vision said.

"Better plan," Tony said. "You tell Natasha what's going on, I'll make sure nobody grabs Laura and the munchkin from the 15th."

Vision did not outright say his own idea was better, but his stiff red face was unimpressed. After a judgmental pause, Vision nodded, and vanished from the 3D display. Tony hurried out of his lab to grab something business appropriate, and nearly fell on his face slipping in the spilled Alka-Seltzer. He scowled at the bubbling puddle as he shuffled out of the room. At least he had some warning his day was going to crap.

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The 15th precinct was crowded and smelled more than a little like pee. People were staring long before Tony set off the metal detector. The two cops manning the door exchanged looks, unsure where Stark stood in their chain of command.

"Maybe you should call your supervisor," Tony said.

One cop looked annoyed, the other looked awestruck. That was the usual mix of reactions he got from the police. Tony did not have much of an entourage with him, just Davis from Stark Industries security and Nygen from the legal department. Both men were armed, though more conventionally than Tony, and bore the required permits. Neither man was on the Avengers payroll.

"Why are you here?" the annoyed cop asked.

"Laura Barton," Tony said.

The awestruck cop looked confused. The annoyed cop picked up an ancient-looking phone that was wired into the wall.

"Somebody find Mahoney," the annoyed cop said.

Tony activated the snooping equipment in his sunglasses and pointed the microphone at the old telephone. Friday enhanced and amplified the other half of the conversation and fed it into Tony's earpiece.

" _Two daytime rescues? The Devil must have insomnia_ ," said the slightly distorted voice on the other end of the ancient phone.

"Not a rescue," Annoyed Cop said.

" _Need an ambulance?"_

"No, get Mahoney. Tony Stark is down here," Annoyed Cop said, sending Tony a glare.

" _The Devil beat up Tony Stark?"_

"No," the annoyed cop growled. "Stark's at the metal detectors with some bodyguards asking about the Barton woman."

" _Mahoney's still in interview with her and the kid_."

"Let him know anyway," the annoyed cop said, and then hung up. He gave Tony a challenging stare. "You can wait here for the detective in charge of her case, but you can't bring weapons into the station."

"I have permits," Tony said.

"I don't care," the annoyed cop said. "If you aren't a police officer, you don't bring a weapon in here."

"You could deputize me," Tony suggested.

The annoyed cop looked even more annoyed. Tony shrugged and handed off the dozen or so weapons he knew would set off the metal detector to Davis. Nygen did the same and sent Davis back to the car. Tony and Nygen made it through the second screening, and sat down on a bench to await the arrival of Mahoney. To kill time, he had Friday look up Detective Mahoney's records and forward them to his phone.

As cops went, Mahoney wasn't terribly impressive. He was smarter than average. He passed all his promotional exams, though he never got the top score. The only really stand-out thing about him was his integrity. Even when organized crime owned half the department, Mahoney didn't take bribes. He didn't get involved in cover-ups. He didn't lose or ignore reports that were inconvenient. He was the obnoxiously righteous guy that no one wanted to work with…except for the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, apparently.

Mahoney had a couple of famous collars, including Wilson Fisk and Frank "The Punisher" Castle, but there were notes that implied that the Devil of Hell's Kitchen had basically handed the men off to Mahoney. There were dozens of other mentions of people requesting to speak to Mahoney because "The Devil said he's an honest cop." There were even a couple of cases where the only thing the reporting parties could say in English was "Mahoney honest cop."

Tony had Friday compare the footage of the man with Laura Barton to news archive footage of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, aka Daredevil. Physically they were a pretty good match, but since most of the videos of Daredevil involved him jumping, flipping, and punching, and the man with Laura was just walking like every other boring pedestrian, Friday could not give him a high-probability match.

Did that mean Daredevil was working with Rogers and the others? Tony scrolled through dozens of pages of public records and media speculation, but he couldn't find any link between Steve Rogers and the mystery vigilante. The guy was just some kind of martial arts enthusiast who read too many comic books as far as Tony or S.H.I.E.L.D. had been able to tell. DNA from blood left at crime scenes told them Daredevil was a standard human, most likely of British or Irish ancestry. Maybe the vigilante and the Captain met in some kind of got-a-sunburn-while-drinking-bad-beer support group.

Tony frowned. Could Rogers still get sunburned? The super-soldier serum probably healed any UV damage quickly. Tony's stomach twisted, bringing his mind back from its tangent. He wondered if he should send Nygen for more Alka-Seltzer, or maybe Tums? The headache part of his hangover had vanished hours ago, but he still felt like he'd been kicked in the gut.

Tony checked in with his satellite, but nothing interesting had happened outside the police station, aside from his double-parked car getting a ticket from the meter maid. Tony had the A.I. double check all of Vision's hacking to see how the Bartons got caught out. Poking through the results of that killed another hour, but didn't get him much. After that he tasked Friday with getting into any nearby smartphones. Friday declared success just as a shadow fell over him.

"Mr. Stark?" a tall man in a cheap beige suit asked. Tony stuffed his own phone into his pocket so nothing incriminating would be seen. "Mr. Stark?" The man sounded a little annoyed, so he had probably called him more than a couple of times. Tony made his best I-am-paying-attention-to you face.

"I am he," Tony said, recognizing Mahoney from the picture in his files.

"If you want to talk, Interview 3 is open," Mahoney said.

"I don't really have anything to say to you," Tony said. "I'm here for Laura Barton."

"Mrs. Barton did not ask for you, and no one else here did, so I'd like you to have a seat in Interview 3, and explain how you ended up looking for her here."

Tony gave a put-upon sigh. "Lead the way."

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The Avengers never set foot in Hell's Kitchen. They had dropped more than a few spaceships on them during the _Incident_ , but the Avengers themselves hadn't touched down. They sure as hell hadn't stopped by the local station to check in. Once in a while people from the 15th would get pulled in for traffic or security details in Midtown where the Avengers did public appearances for charity, but the superhero crap hadn't been near them for almost five years now.

Detective Brett Mahoney was worried the 15th wouldn't be standing by the end of the day.

Sgt. Lewis had passed him a note saying that Tony Stark had showed up at the desk, wanting to see Mrs. Laura Barton. Since she had been in the building less than half an hour, and no press had gone out, Mahoney was very suspicious.

"Let him wait, and keep an eye on him," Mahoney had said.

Mahoney didn't know much about the angst filled super-team breakup, despite his mother talking his ear off about how unfair everyone was being to Captain America. He did know Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, aka that-guy-with-a-bow-and-arrows, had sided with Rogers and had a military warrant out on him because of it. Mrs. Barton and her family had been in hiding until, according to her, the need for a medical consultation forced her and her daughter to surface.

Laura Barton was an astoundingly normal woman; late thirties, dark hair with a few threads of gray. She had a bit of a tan, but it didn't hide the dark circles under her eyes. Her injuries had been photographed and treated. Forensics had taken her clothes as evidence and given her department-issue sweats to wear. She handled it all with aplomb. Her voice was tired, but didn't break as she recounted being abducted at gunpoint, being shot in the arm, and being marched into the sewers, with her daughter in tow.

Nothing about her screamed "I play house with a nut who shoots aliens with arrows," but Mahoney was pretty much convinced that major shit would have gone down, with the associated casualties, property damage and paperwork, had this woman and her child not been rescued. Stark lurking at the front desk probably meant disaster had not been entirely averted.

"Sorry Mrs. Barton," Mahoney said. "Where were we?"

"I think we've gone over most of it," Mrs. Barton said. "I couldn't see much of anything underground. I don't know where they were taking us, or how we got back. Mike just grabbed us and jumped and then we ran."

"And you never got a good look at this Mike guy?" he asked

"No, he wrapped his scarf over his face before we got to the light," she said. "He stopped us to get his sunglasses out of the jacket he'd loaned me, and I could hear him moving his scarf around, and then we climbed up a ladder and there were all these grates and I could see again, but Mike was all covered up, so there was nothing to see."

"Mike said I couldn't see his face 'cause he's very ugly," Lila Barton said, looking up from the crayons, ice cream sundae, and hot chocolate she was using to make a mess in the interview room. Lila seemed less than ruffled by the abduction and rescue, but maybe in 20 years her therapist would say different.

"He was a little scary at first," Lila continued. "Cause it was dark, but he could see okay, so we didn't get lost. I was hoping Daddy would come get us, but Mike was okay, even though he's smelly and ugly."

"I'm sure Mike's glad to have your approval," Mahoney said.

He was already 90 percent sure "Mike" was Daredevil, but he couldn't turn in a report saying that based on the phrase "Mahoney is a good cop." They'd probably get DNA off of the loaned jacket, which left Mahoney with dozens of other questions. A jacket and scarf weren't part of any outfit the Devil of Hell's Kitchen had been seen in. Was that his normal day wear? Was Daredevil just a homeless guy? Did this mean he lived in the sewers? Mahoney sighed.

"Alright," Mahoney said. "We've got your statement, and I think you're being straight with me about this whole thing, but the Feds and two dozen other agencies are probably going to want to talk to you, and ask the same questions I did. Also, Tony Stark is down at the desk. We haven't let him in, and we didn't call him. He says he wants to talk to you about something, but he's got no authority to butt in here. You say you came to New York at his invitation. Do you think he's involved?"

"The more I think about it, the less I think he's involved," Mrs. Barton said. "Stark doesn't think about the consequences of his actions with any kind of realism, but I don't think he'd hire people to come after us."

Mahoney nodded. "Alright. I'm going to have the sketch artist come in and you do your best to describe the men who took you into the sewer. I'm going to interview Stark, make sure he's not involved, and then you can talk to him if you want."

"I suppose I'll have to at some point," Mrs. Barton said, sounding resigned.

Mahoney could sympathize.

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Stark was as aggravating as Mahoney had feared. The billionaire offered to help the NYPD investigate, and when Mahoney explained the dozens of reasons why that would not happen, even if hell did freeze over, Stark went on a very self-incriminating rant about how the NYPD cyber crimes team would never be able to get into a Stark Industries system, much less the real kidnappers'. Stark's legal guy managed not to have a stroke, but it was a near thing.

After wasting an hour of everyone's time, Mahoney escorted Stark to the room where Mrs. Barton and Lila were waiting. The security camera was recording everything, just in case. Stark paused outside the door. Mahoney wondered if it was to steady himself, or rehearse some lines in his head.

"Hey Laura!" Stark greeted as he was waved in. "How's that tractor running?"

Mrs. Barton stood up and Stark flinched.

"What?" Mahoney asked.

Mrs. Barton also looked confused.

"You just had the look that women get before they slap me," Stark said, shrugging.

Mrs. Barton took a fortifying breath. "Did you talk to Clint? Did you tell him-"

"About the Cradle?" Stark asked.

Mrs. Barton looked hopeful, but Stark looked like a deer in the headlights.

Stark shook his head. "Vision got into your email after you were reported missing. I haven't heard from Clint since the Raft. The Cradle was destroyed. The new one is still just blueprints."

Mrs. Barton just nodded like she expected only bad news from now on.

"Do you know who set us up?" she asked.

"It wasn't me," Stark said.

"I didn't think you did this," Mrs. Barton said. "But since you've been in my email, maybe you know now."

Stark's legal guy was shooting him looks and eyeing the security camera, but Stark didn't hesitate to reply. Mahoney was glad they had plenty of tape.

"The messages came from random internet hubs in Europe accessed through public wi-fi spots and internet cafés," Stark said. "Did you see the guys…you know, when they grabbed you? Didn't you recognize any of them?"

"I'm not a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent," Mrs. Barton said. "I never was. Clint didn't bring work home."

"He didn't have pictures to put up for target practice on his archery range?" Stark asked.

"No!" Mrs. Barton said. "He didn't bring work home. The only time his world intruded on ours was when you and the Avengers showed up at our farm to hide from the killer robots you created."

Stark was opening his mouth to reply when a knock on the door interrupted.

"Devil came back," Sgt. Lewis said. "Left two guys in tac-gear in the parking lot."

Stark started tapping on his cell phone.

"You up for an I.D.?" Mahoney asked.

Mrs. Barton nodded.

"Better not bring the kid out," Lewis said. "Paramedics are on the way."

Lila Barton had fallen asleep across three chairs, wrapped in blankets and coats. It was obvious her mother didn't want to leave her, even in a building full of police.

"Take a couple of pictures of their faces and bring those back here," Mahoney said.

"One of them does have a face," Lewis said as he pulled the door closed.

"The Devil?" Mrs. Barton asked.

"He's a vigilante," Mahoney said.

"Who dresses up as the Devil," Stark added.

"I think he might be involved," Mahoney said.

Lewis returned a few minutes later and passed his smart phone to Mrs. Barton. Stark peered over her shoulder as she swiped through the images. Stark looked slightly queasy, which Mahoney found a little bit funny. Tony Stark had been "The Merchant of Death" for a lot longer than the Devil had been rearranging the faces of criminals. Stark's re-branded Iron Man persona wasn't any less prone to bloody high-caliber murder.

"Him," Mrs. Barton said, holding up the screen. "Him I saw. He never said anything to me. The other one…I can't tell. Do you really think Mike did that to him?"

Mahoney supposed the polite man who had rescued her and her daughter and brought them to safety didn't really jive with the bloody pulp in the pictures. Daredevil did have a bit of a reputation for chivalry, despite that not being P.C. anymore. Whenever women and kids were involved, the Devil dialed it back, at least until they had left the scene.

"We don't know that this Mike guy is the Devil of Hell's Kitchen," Mahoney said. "He could just be someone who knows him. The Devil is known on the street."

"And these men are both…going to make it?" Mrs. Barton asked.

Mahoney nodded. "They might wish they were dead the next time they see a mirror, but they'll survive."

Mrs. Barton ran her hands over her face again, her injured arm lagging slightly. "Can we leave? Can I get my things back from the bus? I need to book a flight home."

"I'd rather you stay until we get the all-clear from the Feds on this. We don't know if the rest of these men are still around. Finding them could take a while," Mahoney said. "And we will need you to come back to testify against the ones we do have."

"But that won't be for weeks, right?" Mrs. Barton said. "I need to take Lila home. She needs an eye operation…and it's not going to happen here."

"Hey!" Stark said. "We'll find her somebody in New York. You two can stay at the Tower."

"We can't," Mrs. Barton said. "Thank you for stopping by, Mr. Stark."

That was a dismissal if Mahoney ever heard one.

"I'll walk you out," Mahoney said to Stark, pointing at the door. Mahoney's gut told him Stark wasn't behind the kidnapping, but he would not have let Mrs. Barton leave with him, even if she had said yes. "I've got some calls to make, Mrs. Barton," Mahoney said. "If you need anything, Sgt. Lewis will be at his desk right outside."

"Thank you, detective," she said.

Stark refused to be hurried out the building, walking slowly and gazing around like a tourist, though he'd seen all the same things and all the same people on his way in.

"You think this Daredevil guy will come back?" Stark asked.

 _Of course he will_ , Mahoney thought. _He'll be lurking under my desk or he'll pop out of the fridge in the breakroom or some damn thing._

"Don't know," he said aloud. "He usually doesn't hang around the station."

"But he's not going to go after Laura?" Stark asked.

"If Mrs. Barton tries to hold up a bank at gunpoint or jump an old lady outside the grocery store, there might be an issue. The Devil's pretty consistent at picking targets," Mahoney said. "I don't know what his opinions are on letting a killer robot army loose on the world, so I suggest you get back to your car and your tower as expediently as possible."

Stark scowled, but finally picked up his pace.

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Tony slid into the back of the town car. Nygen got in the front. Despite Mahoney's not-so-subtle hints that the local boogie man was going to get him, Tony wasn't worried. The car was Starktech, and in addition to being bulletproof, it could handle anti-tank mines, and should the vehicle end up falling off a bridge for some reason, it had an emergency air supply and was water-tight to a depth of 300 feet. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen would not be falcon-punching his way into Tony's car.

But if Daredevil was some sort of enhanced human, that could be another problem entirely. Tony checked on Friday's protocols, wondering how his A.I. had missed a man creeping around the outside of the police station in a devil costume. If the Devil could walk through solid objects like Vision could, or just plain turn invisible, Tony would cut Friday some slack.

"Back to the Tower?" Davis asked.

"Not yet," Tony said, pulling a water bottle and Alka-Seltzer out of the mini-bar in the back seat.

Tony turned on the projector on his phone, bringing up the stored satellite feeds. He focused on the 15th 's employee parking lot, going back about half an hour. The sun had set, so most of the footage was just a shadow dragging another shadow out of an alley into the lot, and then throwing something to get the attention of an officer trying to light up a cigarette. Tony overlaid the visible light images with his satellite's infrared cameras. The devil glowed yellow and red.

Tony watched the feeds again, adding city building plans and access tunnels to the view. The Devil had come up out a storm drain less than a block from the police station, and dragged two warm but unmoving bodies to the parking lot. He sometimes passed within three feet of another ambulatory person without getting noticed. Tony tagged the hot spot that was Daredevil and hit fast forward. The devil crawled up the side of the station and lurked on the roof until the two bodies were cuffed and carried to ambulances.

Tony expected him to scuttle back to the sewers, but instead the heat signature moved across the roof and down another wall, stopping above an open stairwell. The image caught up to real time. He was still there. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen was less than 100 feet away.

Tony looked at the case on the floor of the car. 20 seconds to put on the suit, and another 10 to fly to the far side of the police station. All that was missing was U.N. approval. He sighed. He'd have to let the regular police deal with it. He used the bug Friday had installed to track Mahoney's phone via GPS. Mahoney was already on his way to the stairwell.

"That's not suspicious at all," Tony muttered.

He activated the microphone in the detective's phone, routing the call to his own earpiece. He heard fabric moving and a repetitive metal clang as the detective walked up a metal staircase. A door banged open.

" _You out here?"_ Mahoney asked, his voice buzzing and muffled by his pocket.

" _Yes,"_ someone replied, barely audible.

Tony tried to adjust the satellite, but it was too dark and there were ledges and fire-escapes in the way. He could still see the hot spot, though, lurking almost directly above Mahoney.

" _You going by Mike now?"_ Mahoney asked.

" _It seemed…less threatening,"_ the other voice answered.

" _Not being dressed as the devil probably did more for you on that count,_ " Mahoney said, confirming Tony's suspicions. " _Is something going on in the sewers I should know about?"_

" _I was making sure the Hand was gone_ ," Daredevil said.

" _Are they?"_ Mahoney asked, sounding angry.

" _For now."_

" _Great,"_ Mahoney said. _"I take it those two you left for us weren't part of a ninja cult?"_

" _They're just mercenaries_ ," Daredevil said.

" _Are you going to drop off the other six?"_

" _I didn't find the others,"_ he said. " _By the time I got Laura and her daughter to the 15_ _th_ _, most of them were gone."_

" _How'd you get those two?"_

" _They got lost in the sewers,"_ Daredevil said. " _They split up to look for her and were left behind. They don't know who hired them. Their boss deals with that. His name is Andrew Walmanich. He doesn't go out in the field with them, doesn't take risks. They were working out of a closed retail building on the Jersey side of the Lincoln tunnel, but they were taking the Bartons to a boat, rather than returning there."_

" _And they just told you all this?"_ Mahoney asked.

Daredevil ignored the question.

" _They've done this before,"_ Daredevil said, his voice sinking into a lower register. " _They take hostages for third parties, hold people until their clients get what they want. They don't get caught because they don't return the hostages, even if their families give in. He sounded proud that there were never witnesses."_

Tony thought "he" referred to the man with the completely pulped face.

" _Did you get the names of previous victims out of them?"_ Mahoney asked, pulling something out of his pocket. Tony hoped it would be his phone, so he could use the camera on it to get a good look at the Devil, but rustling and scratching told him the cop had taken out a notebook and pencil.

" _A few_ ," Daredevil said, and recited twelve names. Tony did a search of missing persons and found three matches.

" _There were others_ ," Daredevil growled. " _But they couldn't remember all of them."_

" _Anything else I should know?"_ Mahoney asked.

" _Stark is telling the truth,"_ Daredevil said. " _When he spoke to Laura, he said he did not hire those mercenaries, or invite her to New York to use that machine. He was telling the truth."_

" _And you didn't break all his fingers to get to that conclusion?"_ Mahoney asked. _"Maybe punch him in the gut a few times?"_

" _I don't kill,"_ Daredevil said.

" _I didn't say you did,"_ Mahoney said. " _I'd have taken a shot at you a long time ago if I thought you did. I'm asking if I'm about to find an obnoxious billionaire beat black-and-blue on the steps of my station."_

" _The next person to beat Stark will kill him,"_ Daredevil said. " _He has an aneurysm forming in his hepatic artery. One serious blow to the abdomen or a night of heavy drinking and he will be explaining his actions to all his victims in person."_

" _If I ask you how you know that, is this conversation going to get freakier?"_

" _Yes."_

" _You wanna come down from there so I can arrest you?"_

" _No."_

" _Then please get the hell off of my building."_

" _Good night, detective."_

Tony watched the hot spot drop off the side of the station and then suddenly swing over the building next door.

" _Crazy bastard,"_ Mahoney muttered as he went back inside.

Tony watched the dot darting across another roof and then through two more alleys before disappearing inside a warehouse. The building was too insulated for the satellite to see through. Tony stared at the screen and then at the Alka-Seltzer in his hand.

He supposed Daredevil could have seen him holding his stomach as he walked to or from the police station, and was now playing some kind of mind game, but he would have to know Tony was listening in. Tony had Friday run another sweep, but the bug on Mahoney's phone was running normally, and no unauthorized broadcasts were coming out of Tony's car.

A text from an unknown number appeared on Tony's phone.

 **[You looked unwell in the police station. Have you been to the doctor recently? My neighbor had a hepatic aneurysm, with very similar symptoms.]**

Tony traced the call to a burner phone, and though he could not trace the purchase history of the phone, he could tell that it was inside the police station. He'd bet good money the awkward warning was from Mahoney. He supposed the mind game could have been between Mahoney and the devil.

 _But if it's a mind game, why does my stomach hurt?_ Tony thought.

"Sir?" Davis called. "The meter maid is back."

Tony looked up and saw a sour-faced woman glaring at the tinted glass. She could not see in, but as if sensing his attention, she pointed dramatically at a tow truck that was coming up the street. Tony was pretty sure that the civilian vehicle wouldn't be able to lift his armored sedan, but decided not to make more of a scene. He rolled down his window.

"You win this round," Tony said.

The woman did not look pleased by his concession. "The court date is printed on the ticket."

"I'll see you there," Tony said. "Wear something sexy."

Nygen made an unhappy noise, but the meter maid finally reacted. Tony wasn't sure if disgust was a better look for her than grumpy.

"Back to the Tower," he called.

"Yes, sir," Davis said.

Tony settled back in his seat. He had Friday call up a dozen Stark industries security specialists, and ordered them to keep a watch on the 15th, in case something happened with Laura and the kid. He blew out a breath, and had Friday call up his personal physician as well.


	3. Mine

**Equivocate**

 **By Marz1**

 **Chapter 3: Mine**

Noun: a device containing an explosive charge, floating on or moored beneath the surface of the water or buried in the ground, which detonates on contact

Pronoun: a form of the possessive case of I used as a predicate adjective: something that belongs to me

Verb: to dig in the earth for the purpose of extracting subterranean resources

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A woman, who most often answered to the name Natasha Romanoff, took one last look around the disabled vehicle. There weren't any damaging files, paper or electronic to destroy, and sadly no extra weaponry to collect. The dummy wearing Minister Andrukhovych's favorite suit and toupee sat still and silent in the passenger's seat. If only the real Andrukhovych were as capable of shutting up. Even now his borrowed personal phone was ringing in the dummy's pocket.

Kicking out the windshield wasn't the safest way out of the car, but within the next 30 seconds she would have to do it. The passenger door was pinned closed by the pole she'd hit, and the car that hit her had bent and crushed the driver's door to the point where it would take the jaws-of-life to open it.

The assassins were expecting her to either stay with the Minister, or drag him with her. Honestly, she had more positive feelings about the dummy than the actual man, but she left it, and rolled through shattered glass into the street. Bullets peppered the sidewalk, from an assault rifle rather than a sniper. She zigzagged and stutter-stepped her way to cover behind another row of cars, and then crawled along the ground, inching toward where she thought they would be.

The more she thought about it, the more this mission reminded her of the tamer punishment assignments from the Red Room. If an asset wasn't living up to their standards, they'd be assigned to a protection detail, supposedly to learn from the enemy. If you couldn't catch the other assassin, you were expected to take the bullet.

So what had she learned?

She had only seen two of them, but suspected there were between 4 and 6 in the team. They were military, possibly ex-, depending how quickly they were disavowed. They were speaking Russian, loudly into cell phones instead of radios, probably trying to convince random witnesses that this was an organized crime, instead of a government-sponsored one.

She heard boots moving toward the car she had abandoned, and took the detonator off of her belt. The charges were small, more for noise than for concussion. She pressed her hands over her ears and hit the switch.

BOOM!

She stood up, drawing her gun. Two men lay on their backs in the street by the car, one clawing at his face, the other completely still. She saw another man, in an alley across the street. He was mostly in shadow and she could not instantly tell if he was a civilian taking cover, or another assassin lying in wait. She fought down her instinct to kill him just to avoid loose ends. A moment later he moved, and she saw a gun in his hand. She fired.

He fell, and a moment later bullets shattered the windows of the parked car she was using for cover. She turned and fired, taking out the shooter in a third floor window across the street without really registering what he looked like. He tipped over the sill and dropped to the sidewalk. She ducked and ran, hunched over, behind the parked cars for half the block, and then darted across the street.

No one fired at her. She moved again, circling the smashed government car, watching windows and alleys for other members of the ambush. None appeared. Either they had fled, or they were never there. She moved to inspect the fallen, half her attention on the surrounding buildings. The civilian population was gaining confidence, peering through curtains and making obvious silhouettes. She could hear police sirens now, but they were coming from the wrong street.

Neither of the men knocked down by the car-bomb were dead, and a boot to the head insured they were both unconscious. She checked their phones, and saw only three other numbers on each. That gave evidence for a four-man team. She checked the others. The one in the alley was dead. The one who fell out of the window was surprisingly alive, but she doubted he would remain so, given his head injury.

She found a stairwell with a reasonable amount of cover, and sat down. As far as she could tell the mission was finished, except for the bureaucratic nonsense. As an assassin or an agent, or even an Avenger in the good old days of a few months ago, she could have just vanished, and left some other agent to clean up the mess. Now she had to speak to the local authorities in person, and then report to the U.N. Accords Council, also in person. She switched her personal phone back on, and it rang a moment later.

TONY STARK! The screen flashed as AC/DC blasted out of the speakers. Frowning slightly she hit the accept button.

"Oh, hey," Tony said, as if she had called him. "How's the mission going?"

"Fine," she said. "I just completed it. How are things in New York?"

"Could be better I guess," he said. "Did Vision call you?"

She took the phone away from her ear and saw there were 27 missed calls and twice as many texts from the android.

"Is something wrong, Tony?" she asked, knowing there must be.

"Did you know your locator cut out?" he asked instead of answering.

The U.N. had given her a black box tracking unit to keep her from tampering with it, so she put it inside a few nested layers of mint-tins to keep it from transmitting. She was told at the beginning of the mission that there would be no extraction and no Avenger back up, so there was no reason for her to broadcast her location.

"Must be solar flares," she said.

"Of course. Those," Tony said.

There was a long silence. She wondered if he was thinking of what to say, or if he had been distracted in the middle of the conversation.

"Is there another mission, or should I head back to New York?" she asked.

"Missions. No. None yet. I just have a…you know, a general question," Tony said. "Do you know the Devil of Hell's Kitchen?"

If Tony was planning to recruit, he had his sights on the wrong target. As far as she could tell, the Devil was a head-case, with Hulk-sized anger issues, and no superpowers to make dealing with him worth the effort. He hadn't ever killed anyone, and only picked on criminals, so most government officials were content to let him go until he found a bullet with his name on it.

"I've never met him," Natasha said. "I've read a few briefings from the NYPD. There are a few theories floating around S.H.I.E.L.D. too, but no definite I.D. Your friend Spiderboy probably has a better read on him than I do. They're both street-level operators."

She wasn't thrilled that Tony had recruited a child to fight Captain America, but she'd already been an active agent at that age. The kid wasn't a bad fighter. It was his motormouth that drove her to distraction.

"It's Spider- _man_ ," Tony corrected. "I haven't asked him yet. So the Devil's not a friend of yours?"

"No," she said.

"Is he a friend of Barton's?"

"Not that I know of," she said. "What happened?"

"There was an incident. Everyone's fine…well, everyone you know is fine…well, a little banged up…but fine, except-"

"Tony," she interrupted.

"Laura and Lila got kidnapped, but also rescued," Tony said.

"By whom?" she asked.

"The Devil of Hell's Kitchen," Tony said.

"I thought he didn't operate outside of New York," Natasha said.

"He doesn't. They came here, to New York, for a trap. Laura's been writing emails to Clint, and they were intercepted."

"By the Devil of Hell's Kitchen?"

"What? No, by the mercenaries."

"Tony," she said. "Try again, in order."

She got a better sit-rep the second time. Laura had brought Lila to New York to use the Cradle, and had been snatched by mercenaries. They were rescued by Hell's Kitchen's resident vigilante when the mercs tried to move them through the Devil's neighborhood. The Devil then escorted Laura and Lila to a police station, and though Tony went to pick them up, they wouldn't go to the tower with him. He was keeping an eye on them with his own security personnel and Vision was busy tracking down the mercenaries' boss.

"It sounds like you have it handled," she said, careful not to give away her internal turmoil.

"Yeah, sure," Tony said. "Except Laura doesn't trust me, and the kid is still sick…and they won't let me help."

Natasha had known Lila Barton since Lila was an infant. Clint Barton had spared Natasha's life only a few months before the girl's birth. She had already figured out Clint had children, from various behavioral cues and the occasional Lego that turned up in his mission gear. She never asked about them, so she was a bit surprised when, after a mission in Greenland, Clint turned off their jets' trackers, and made a detour to a small farm.

When she saw the little boy and a woman with a baby in her arms step out onto the porch, she thought it would be another mission; the dark kind of wetworks job that Clint had promised she would never be assigned. She was planning to shoot Clint in the back of the head when the woman laughingly shouted "Just in time!" and handed Clint the baby, who obviously needed a diaper change.

Surgical alterations in the Red Room ensured she would never bear children, and she had convinced herself she didn't want to bear anything more than she already had. She didn't want stretch marks or incontinence or sleepless nights full of fevers, vomit, and yowling. She didn't want to be responsible for another person's entire life. She didn't want to add another failure when it all went bad.

She knew how to deal with children. She had been trained to gain their trust, to lure them away from parents or nannies without making a scene. She knew how to keep them alive, if a hostage was required. She knew how to dispose of them when they were no longer needed. Clint knew all about her training. He trusted her anyway.

The Bartons and their farm didn't make her want children, though she had grown attached to Clint's in the years since. That farm showed her that the people she worked with were not like the Red Room. S.H.I.E.L.D. expected you to die if a mission required it, but they did not take the rest of your life, too. At that farm, she realized she could have a life of her own; a life that wasn't just about violence and manipulation and death.

It was too bad in all the years since, she hadn't learned how to live that way. She thought maybe she had a chance with Bruce, who was beyond her ability to ruin, but she wasn't what he wanted.

She knew what Clint wanted, though. He wanted his wife and three children safe from violence; both giving and receiving it. He didn't want his children to be agents or spies. He wanted them safe, and if she couldn't get what she wanted out of life, she could ensure her friend did.

"I'll be back in the States in twelve hours," Natasha said. "Forward me what you've got and I'll take over when I land."

Flashing blue lights drew her attention. The police had finally arrived on the scene, though they hadn't noticed her yet. Her phone chimed as emails from Tony poured in. Most of the files were about the mercenaries who had been captured. Several were about Lila's medical condition. A few were about the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, though she doubted he would be involved any further, since Laura and Lila were outside his self-imposed jurisdiction, in an upscale Midtown hotel.

 _Another debt in my ledger_ , she thought.

"Local police are here," she said, though they still hadn't spotted her. "I'll call you when I've got something."

"Oh yeah…there is one other thing before you go," Tony said. "I might die, so I figured I'd say…sorry for being such an ass about Rogers and…all of that. I'm still right, but I get that you thought you could fix it."

"Step back for a second," Natasha said. "Why might you die?"

"I've got a hepatic aneurysm that's ballooning up like crazy. Surgeons are going to work on it, maybe a stent, maybe a transplanted leg vein. It was probably from the shrapnel, but they can't rule out alcoholism, or genetics either. Or, you know, karma. Weirdly enough the Devil of Hell's Kitchen diagnosed me. Don't know how he knew, but my doctor confirmed it. Maybe he asked the man downstairs. Anyway…"

Natasha fought the urge to hang up or swear. The first time she met Tony, he was gravely ill, being poisoned by the heavy metals leaching off an arc reactor that at the time had been implanted in his chest. Tony did not react well to reminders of his own mortality. The longer he was forced to think about them, the worse his decisions became. She did not want Laura and Lila in the middle of an epic Stark breakdown.

She didn't want Tony to die either, of course.

The planet would need Tony's genius when the next invasion came. The Chitauri were only the first to attack Earth after the Tesseract put the planet back on the galactic map. Earth needed the Avengers too, and Stark was one of the few people with enough influence to get Steve and the others pardoned if he chose to.

She looked up at the sky for a minute, the brightest stars barely visible through the glare of streetlights and the blue strobes on the emergency vehicles. Trainers in the Red Room made sure they knew that stars were nuclear reactions, unfathomable distances away, only useful for finding direction in the physical world. _There is nothing more to them. There is nothing more to you._

She knew Tony wasn't calling her because he wanted to hear that the world needed him. He had probably called Rhodey already, though depending on where he was deployed, the operator of War Machine may not have answered. Tony was afraid and he wanted to talk to a friend. She pondered how far down on that list she was, since he had not really trusted her since Germany. Of course, since half of Tony's friends had run off with Steve Rogers or vanished from the known world, the list could not have been very long to start with.

"I forgive you for being an ass, Tony," she said. "But I won't forgive you for dying. Survive or I'll make you regret it."

She used her most threatening tone, and was rewarded with a strangled squeak through the phone. After a pause, Tony cleared his throat.

"People generally say things like 'good luck' in this sort of situation," he said.

"Do they?" she asked. "You don't need luck. You need the world's best surgeons. Since I am certain you have hired them, you have no excuses. Forward me the files. I'll have an action-plan ready when I land."

"Have I ever told you how hot your 'bossy voice' is, Ginger Spice?" Tony asked.

"While the surgeons are working on your innards, see if they can do something about all the bullshit that comes out of your mouth."

Tony let out a startled huff and then gasped in pain.

"Only hurts when you laugh?" Natasha suggested into the worryingly silent phone.

"Yeah, that," Tony wheezed. "See you later."

"Later, Tony."

She hung up, hoping there would be a later.

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The building was populated almost entirely with medical practices. That morning, an extra man wearing scrubs had walked in, blending in with the employees. He made his way to the ophthalmologist's clinic on the eighth floor. The hardest part of getting in position had been getting past the medical assistant at the front desk, but his overwatch had spliced his way into the building's closed-circuit security cameras, and had used comms to guide him. When the assistant left her post to fetch files in a side room, he had slipped past, stepping into a supply closet an instant before she returned.

He had been waiting in the closet for almost an hour, getting more and more restless. He adjusted his scrubs. The top was too tight in the arms and across the chest, and the hem still hung down almost to his knees.

" _Targets are entering the lobby now."_

"Escorts?" he asked in a low voice.

" _One, designation red."_

"Are their comms active?"

 _"Negative, frequencies are clear. Not even a phone."_

"Is the escort armed?"

 _"Is the sky blue?"_

He had expected as much.

 _"They're in the elevator, and lucky you, the secretary has taken a potty break."_

He took a slow breath to keep his heart rate down, and left the closet. The clinic only had three exam rooms. According to overwatch, only one was set up for children.

 _"Escort has a shadow."_ There was a pause. " _They're staying outside."_

He kept walking. He clicked an acknowledgement on his comm instead of answering out loud.

 _"Another shadow on the roof across the street, setting up scopes and cameras, no weapons. You're clear if you get there in 20."_

He clicked again. 19…18…17…. He crossed a window.

 _"Shadows are with the elephant."_

He repressed a snort. That was probably the best designation they'd come up with for Stark. He clicked acknowledgement a third time. 14…13….

He found the correct room and stepped inside, moving to stand in the little triangle of cover between the open door and the wall. He fought down nerves. He wanted to treat this like any other mission for as long as possible.

The clinic door opened. He heard quiet chatter at the front desk and then four sets of footsteps.

"You can wait here for the doctor," the assistant said. "I'm afraid it may be a few minutes, she had an emergency consultation."

It would be an hour at least. The doctor was across the bridge in Queens, waiting for a lunch-break Tinder hook-up who was not going to show.

"Thank you," Laura Barton said.

She did not see him as she walked in, leading Lila Barton by the hand. The escort did though and pushed the door against him as she waved the medical assistant away.

Their escort, Natasha Romanoff, turned and slammed the door closed with more force and drama than necessary, leaving him exposed. He had time for one more calming breath before the screaming started.

"DADDY!"

Clint Barton's daughter leapt at him. He dropped to his knees so she wouldn't faceplant into the guns strapped to his belly.

 _"I think I heard that without the comms,"_ Sam Wilson muttered from his lookout post on the roof across the street.

Clint clicked acknowledgement, and then switched his comm to receive only. Natasha glided over, pulled the earpiece out of his ear, and put it in her own. He tried not to make a face, or think about ear germs. She'd let him know if Sam called in a problem.

"Hey pumpkin, I missed you!" Clint said, scooping Lila up off the floor.

The rogue Avengers were about to catch a flight to India when Natasha's message reached him, telling him the farm was no longer secure, and that someone had gone after his family. It was short-sighted and would have gotten them all fired if they worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., but the entire team insisted on delaying the mission, to help Clint get his family to safety.

"I missed you more!" Lila shrieked in his ear, her feet kicking excitedly against his shins. He didn't remember her being this tall.

"I missed you most!" Clint said.

"More than Cooper?" Lila asked, sibling rivalry alive and well in the glint in her eyes.

Natasha and his wife looked on him with amused judgment.

"Walked right into that one," Laura said.

"Yes he did," Natasha agreed.

"Dad! Dad! Am I your favorite?" Lila persisted.

He looked pleadingly at his wife. She had lost weight since he had last seen her, and the bags under her eyes told him she was, as usual, carrying more than her fair share of the stress. Natasha had warned him that Laura had been grazed by a bullet during the kidnapping, but she did not move like the wound was bothering her.

"Daaaaaaaaaaaaaad! Dad!"

"Doesn't your mom get a hug?" Laura asked, butting in to save him.

Clint dragged her in, ignoring Lila's grumbles about being squished between them. He wanted to apologize to Laura, but they didn't have time for proper groveling.

"I missed you mostest," Laura murmured in his ear. He thought he heard forgiveness in that sentence.

"That's not a word," Lila said.

"Your parents are so cool they make up their own words," Clint said.

"No they aren't," Lila countered, and started to squirm. "Are we going home now?"

Natasha had already told Laura about their new house in Kansas. It wasn't a farm like they had in Pennsylvania, but it was a large rural property with room to run around. They wouldn't be able to send the animals, since they were harder to move between states than people were. Steve and Scott had moved all the Barton family's personal possessions, blatantly abusing Pym's shrinking technology.

They had also blatantly abused Steve Rogers' pretty face to convince Mrs. Witold, Cooper and Nathaniel's babysitter, to take a last-second road trip halfway across the country in the back of a windowless van. It wasn't that he didn't think the two men could watch a baby for a few days, it was that he wanted them to have their hands free to fight if something went wrong. He also did not want to make Cooper solely responsible for his infant brother's safety. Cooper was a responsible teenager, but that was too much weight to put on his shoulders.

"Not yet," Clint said. "I heard your eye was hurting you, pumpkin."

"My eye has a cancer," Lila said.

Clint was a little shocked by the comment, since he thought from Natasha's coded messages that he was here to break the bad news.

"We went to a consultation yesterday morning," Laura said. "The doctor was blunt."

Clint nodded, trying to keep anger from showing on his face. He supposed it was inevitable that someone would be that callous or stupid. Natasha had been escorting Laura and Lila to eye experts for the past three days to set up a cover for this meeting, and they'd do a few the next day, too. The actual surgery was going to happen in Chicago at the end of the week. The fake paperwork had already gone through.

"They're going to poke it out," Lila added.

Lila's face fluctuated between hopeful and confused as if she wasn't sure if this was something she should cry over. Even as a toddler Lila wasn't much of a crier. It always scared him how well she took bad news.

"With a pointy stick?" he asked, keeping his voice light.

"No," she said with a theatrical scowl. "With a medical thing. They said I could keep it in a jar, but that it would get mushy pretty quick."

"Maybe we can put it in the freezer," Clint said, careful not to choke up.

"That's gross, Dad."

"Yeah, that's the gross part," Laura said.

Lila spent the next half hour talking, happy to hang on her father's arms, and use him as a jungle-gym, all the while telling him about her visits to various doctors and the kidnapping and her new friend Mike. Clint was happy, too, as her chattering voice washed over him, but a little relieved when Lila asked her mother to take her to the bathroom.

"You going to take a break for a while?" Natasha asked. "Get them settled?"

"Not a long one," Clint said. "We haven't found the bastard who sent the team after them, and there's still that thing in India to deal with."

"The suitcase nuke?" she asked.

"No, that was easy-over in a weekend. Now there's some kind of doomsday cult that might have gotten ahold of a weaponized disease," Clint said. "I kind of wish we could hand it off to your team, but the U.N. leaks like a sieve."

"Did you have a chance to look at the traces I sent you?" Natasha asked.

"Yeah," Clint said. "I'm guessing that was work you borrowed from Vision, rather than Tony's."

"Tony's still recovering from surgery," she said. "He had a bad reaction to the anesthetic."

"Why did he need surgery?" Clint asked, half-tempted to joke about liposuction.

"Aneurysm," she said. "The Devil of Hell's Kitchen warned him about it before it blew."

"So is the guy a psychic or something?" Clint asked.

"If he was, I doubt he'd spend so much time beating information out of people," she said.

"He might just like beating people," Clint said.

"Very possible," Natasha acknowledged.

"Are you thinking of recruiting him?" Clint asked. "Maybe as off-the-books backup?"

"No," she said. "I don't think he has the right mindset for our kind of work. Maybe I'll buy him a thank-you dinner, get him Steve's autograph."

"So you are going to track him down?" Clint asked.

"Hopefully before Tony does," Natasha said.

"You think Stark will try to hire him?" he asked.

"That or get him on an Accords violation," she said. "He's a little ambivalent."

"So am I," Clint said. He imagined a stranger alone with his wife and daughter and it made his skin crawl, despite Lila declaring that the man was her friend. He had trouble believing the man was only there by coincidence.

"Why?" she asked.

"A random weirdo stepped in out of nowhere and saved my family," Clint said. "I think I should be grateful, but…I don't know. I'm suspicious."

"Usually you are that random weirdo."

Clint sighed. "I know. But if he is on the level, then I owe him, more than I can pay back."

"So does Tony, but we did keep New York from being taken over by aliens or nuked by the World Council, so I think we've got some credit in the local bank," she said, and then changed the subject. "I've got transportation set up for Laura and Lila. Have you got their new identities, or should I set that up, too?"

"I've got them; new first and last names for everybody," Clint said.

The group that had lured Laura from the farm had somehow found out that Clint had a family, and his children's first names. They used that information to find Cooper and Lila through their school district records, and then sent Cooper spyware attached to a homework assignment. The spyware not only gave away the farm's location, it infected the other computers in the house. Clint could only assume the farm wasn't attacked directly because they were worried he would be home.

Vision had eventually found the general location where the spyware was sending its data, but the guilty parties were long gone by then. All they had was an empty apartment in Maryland with heavy duty hard-lines but no equipment.

The only big clue they had was that the coding used in the spyware wasn't open-source, and was similar to spyware "accidentally" released into the U.N.'s system a few weeks before. The U.N. claimed nothing was taken, but Clint had an image stuck in his head of some puffed-up politician reading information on Clint's family, and storing it on a computer with a password of "password123".

"I've heard some chatter," Natasha said. "But I haven't had time to confirm if it is more than rumors."

Clint nodded

"A source of mine," Natasha began, "Who was spying on A.I.M. on behalf of Hydra, but is now freelance, heard that someone on the board of West Tech, an A.I.M. subsidiary, was going to make a move on Stark, which isn't all that unusual, except there was some gloating that they wouldn't even have to pay the assassin they were using. It could be an entirely separate plot, but it could also be someone taking a page out of Zemo's book."

"Any idea what they thought Stark's death would accomplish?" Clint asked.

"It would put a whole lot of Stark tech on the black market," Natasha said. "Even if the military did seize everything after Stark's death, it would leak. Knock-off arc reactors are already popping up everywhere since Vanko and Hammer. I know A.I.M. would much rather clone tech then reverse-engineer it."

"But you don't know for sure?" Clint asked.

"No, though I plan to use future free time to pursue the matter," she said.

"Not to pick a fight," Clint said. "But you don't have much free time anymore."

"You're keeping tabs on me?" she asked.

"We just want to be around, in case you need backup," Clint said. "You haven't been on many missions with Tony."

"I know," she said. "The U.N doesn't trust me. I'm not really a superhero in their eyes. I'll always be an assassin and a spy, and that doesn't play well when you're trying to convince the world that you are interested in peacekeeping rather than control."

"But killer robots are still okay by them?" Clint asked.

"Technically Stark and War Machine aren't robots, and Vision hasn't killed anyone who meets the biological definition of alive," she said. "But I suppose I see your point."

"You can run away with us to Kansas," Clint said.

She smirked. "Then who will run interference for you?"

Clint frowned. When he had recruited Natasha to S.H.I.E.L.D., he had promised she wouldn't have to do all the shady stuff she did for the Red Room, but Clint no longer had any say in where she was sent.

"I didn't mean to leave you in this position," he said. "And I don't want you to stay in the middle of this just for our sake. You're in the most danger."

"I didn't do this just for you," she said.

"I know, but I'm still worried."

"Worried about what?" Lila asked as she scampered back into the exam room, with Laura a step behind.

"He's worried about his job," Natasha said. "It's giving him gray hair."

"That's 'cause you're worried?" Lila asked. "I thought it was because you're old?"

"No," Laura said. "The wrinkles are because he's old. You should straighten dad's wrinkles for him."

Lila pounced on him, pulling at the corners of his mouth and his eyes to smooth out the lines. Clint made faces to make her task harder. They both knew the wrinkles would come back, no matter how many times you smooth them out.

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 **Author's note:** This chapter turned out so talky. Oh well. Plot things had to happen. Review if you dare!

 **Next chapter:** Matt the human disaster comes up with his best plan yet! Tony drives the bulldozer of helpfulness! Rainbows and puppies for all!


	4. Bluff

**Equivocate**

 **By Marz1**

 **Chapter 4: Bluff**

Noun: a high, steep bank (usually formed by river erosion)

Verb: to deceive an opponent by a bold bet on an inferior hand

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Tony Stark awoke in an achy blur. He knew right away he was in the recovery room in the Tower. This wasn't the first time he woke, but it seemed the most solid. He had vague recollections of a nurse forcing applesauce and pills into his mouth while the Price is Right played on a TV in the background.

He wasn't sure if any of the team had come by to check on him after his surgery. He had a ghostly memory of seeing a woman standing by the floor-to-ceiling window in his room. He couldn't tell if it was Pepper or Natasha, or if it actually happened. Now that he was fully awake, he could check with security, but wasn't sure if he wanted to know.

He pressed the call button hooked to the side of his bed, and a doctor hurried in. Tony couldn't recall the man's name, but blamed it on the drugs. He was told how well the surgery went, and how poorly the anesthesia went, but it was only a little coma. He would be fine.

Tony nodded along as he was given a long list of things not to do over the next week: no solid food, no alcohol, no sex, no standing up unassisted, no sneaking off to the lab, and definitely no climbing into the Iron Man suit. The doctor left him alone with orders to rest.

Tony stared at the ceiling for a full thirty seconds before he had Friday put a call through to a P.A., with orders to bring him his tablet, and, after being sworn to secrecy, his reading glasses. He logged on and glared at the screen. Dozens of icons flashed red, begging for attention. His headache got a little worse at the thought of sorting through them.

"Hey, Friday?" he called.

"Yes, sir?" the A.I. replied.

"Do you think anyone will notice if I just slack off for the rest of the day?" he asked.

"Since that won't alter your usual schedule, I doubt it," the A.I. replied. "However, there are multiple high-priority calls and emails from General Ross and the Accords council."

"Can you summarize them?"

"Laura and Lila Barton have vanished, and Ross's agents cannot locate them. He wants Ms. Romanoff made available for questioning."

Tony looked through his tablet, and saw the protection detail he had put on the Bartons had lost them inside a medical building in Midtown. It was basically the only place they had gone without Natasha the entire week. The Stark Industries security team never saw Clint or any of the other rogue Avengers, and Tony couldn't find any electronic evidence of contact.

"Dial Natasha for me," he said.

She appeared on his tablet in a t-shirt and sweats. He saw weights and a punching bag in the background. Friday traced Natasha's phone to a public gym, rather than the Avengers' training room in the Tower. She looked as close as she ever did to relaxed, so he assumed she knew where Laura and the kid were, and wasn't worried.

 _She didn't leave with them_ , he thought. _That's something, I guess_.

"Hey, Scary Spice," he said. "You miss me?"

"I thought I was Ginger Spice."

"I've upgraded you," Tony said.

"But not to a pop band in this decade," she said.

"What are you talking about?" he asked. "They had a comeback tour!"

"I'm guessing you didn't call about bands?" Natasha prompted.

"Laura and Lila are in the wind," he said. "Do you know where they went?"

"General Ross already asked me that, rather rudely. Unfortunately, I was at a One Square on 10th at the time they disappeared, so I can't tell him what happened."

"Is that the coffee shop with the automatic cameras everywhere that post to the shop's web page so you don't have to take your own selfies?" Tony asked.

"Yes", she said. "Have you been?"

"No, but I saw some news vlog about it being a factory for narcissism," he said.

"Worried you're running out?" she asked.

"Never," Tony said, trying to keep his voice breezy. "I might go in there for an alibi."

"Their coffee is mediocre at best," she said, and raised a challenging eyebrow.

He stared back. He was completely convinced she had helped the Bartons escape from New York. He was tempted to loop his image to win the staring contest, but decided to be mature.

"Did I miss anything else during my day off?" he asked.

"Are you caught up on Vision's attempts to track down the kidnappers?"

"I got up to the dead end in a Maryland apartment," Tony said. "Did you have any luck in the real world?"

"I haven't been able to go looking," she said. "The Accords council says I took personal time walking Lila and Laura around, so they won't grant me any more leave."

"Did you try putting the search through as a mission? This Andrew Walmanich guy seems like big trouble."

"Not as big as a tribal land dispute in Malawi, apparently," she said. "I've got a flight out to my new assignment tonight."

"Why would they send you there?" he asked. "Not that you wouldn't be a good mediator or anything, but that-"

"Is not something in my official skill set?" she said. "I think the distance is more important than the job."

"Who did you piss off this time?" he asked.

"I was looking into an A.I.M. subsidiary called West Tech. I tried to get Vision's help, but he mentioned it to the Accords council, and suddenly…Malawi."

"What does West Tech have to do with anything?" he asked.

"There was a rumor going around that they might be linked to Walmanich's mercenaries," she said. "Strangely enough, the brother-in-law of Florian Hess, who is close friends with Philippe Stalder on the Accords council, recently invested in the company."

"You think the council would shut you down over that?" Tony asked.

"They're politicians, Tony. Maybe you could look into that, and your own company's stock. We can talk about it when I get back. I'll bring you some roasted grasshoppers."

Before he could object, she ended the call.

"Well, that was ominous," he muttered as he went looking for Stark Industries stock records. Even on his tablet, the files were deeply buried. He swept through engineering diagrams and R&D proposals before getting to the tedious money matters.

He wasn't sure what Natasha had meant. His stock value was still climbing, even as other tech companies dropped. Maybe she meant someone was trying to buy up enough to get a controlling interest, which shouldn't be possible since he kept fifty-one percent of the shares. He didn't find any one purchaser acting suspiciously, but he did find a half-dozen disturbingly timed sales. His six largest foreign investors had dumped their stock a few hours before Tony was taken into surgery.

He googled "Tony Stark" and "surgery" and found dozens of pages about the procedure he underwent two years ago, to have the shrapnel taken out of his chest. There were a few random tabloid articles about rumored cosmetic implants, and one he hadn't seen before about him getting a sex change. There was nothing about his aneurysm in the media.

So either it was a suspicious coincidence, or someone leaked the information about his medical problem to those stockholders, and they had bailed, thinking he'd die and take the stock value with him. His medical team could be to blame, but he doubted they were the ones Natasha was throwing shade on. He considered Detective Mahoney or the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, but neither of them screamed international business.

He had Friday dig into the meta-data on the stock dumpers, and the A.I. quickly linked four of them to Hwang Jae-joon, a member of the Accords council. The other two were friends of Hwang's friends.

"This…isn't good," Tony mumbled.

He had informed the council that he would be unavailable due to a medical issue, as the Accords required. The information was supposed to be confidential, to keep supervillains from making a move when the Avengers were a man down. Though the Accords didn't specifically say anything about insider trading, he was ninety percent sure this was not aboveboard.

That someone on the Accords council had tried to profit from his possible death was not entirely unexpected, since, as Natasha said, they were politicians. It still left him with a bad feeling. He tried to tell himself this was just the normal white-collar crime that people in power got away with.

 _Joke's on them; I pulled through._

He didn't have any solid proof that Hwang had blabbed, only a chain of connections that probably wouldn't hold up in court. He didn't have the authority to investigate the matter, since international financial crime was outside the Avengers' purview. He could hack the council's computer systems and then publish the information online, and burn the United Nations as Natasha had burned S.H.I.E.L.D. He would likely be caught, but he could do it.

What would the consequences be? Would the U.N. just put a few new politicians in to replace the ones Tony proved were corrupt? Would they dissolve the Accords entirely?

Tony frowned. Maybe that was what Natasha was trying to get him to do, discredit the council so Rogers and his merry band of outlaws could get back in the world leaders' good books.

 _See, we were right not to sign_ , Rogers' imaginary voice mocked.

"No you weren't," Tony said out loud.

He sent Friday to launch Trojans at the email accounts of West Tech employees, as well as at the personal staff of Hwang Jae-joon and Philippe Stalder, and his friend Florian Hess. Corporate espionage and spying on three members of the U.N. was enough to prove he wasn't ignoring Natasha's concerns, without playing into whatever pro-Rogers operations she was running.

To let her know he was onto her, he had Friday look for Natasha's hotel booking in Malawi, hoping to have the least-appetizing food on the local menu sent to her room as a welcome gift. Instead he found the council bureaucrats hadn't made hotel arrangements, and were issuing Natasha vouchers that he doubted anyone would accept. Her flight to Malawi also had a ridiculous number of layovers, and she was seated in coach, right next to the bathroom, on those planes that actually had bathrooms.

"Ok," he muttered. "Maybe they are out to get you."

He dug up a credit card number and bumped Natasha up to first class on all her flights, and found her a decent hotel and a car service to bring her there once she landed. To make sure she didn't think he was losing his edge, he also ordered strippers sent to her room, scheduling a new one to show up every hour after she arrived. He had gotten Rhodey court-martialed with a similar prank when he was stationed at Ramstein.

With that settled, he went back to flipping through his email, deleting many of Ross' high-priority messages without opening them. It took him all of a minute to get bored with that, too.

"What should I be doing now?" he asked Friday.

"Resting," the A.I. said.

"I have to do something," he said. "Idle hands are…something or other."

"The devil's workshop," the A.I. provided. "Alternately they are the devil's playthings or the devil's tools."

"Right," Tony said. "On it."

The Devil of Hell's Kitchen still had to be found and dealt with. Tony figured he could get the man a good shrink and some better armor, and get him signed onto the Accords the same way he had Spiderman. He doubted it would take more than a week to track the vigilante down if he threw enough resources at the project.

He brought up the research he and Friday had done before Tony went under the knife. He had copies of police reports and news articles, as well as a dozens of video uploads to social media sites. While the A.I. mapped out fan sightings and police reports, Tony looked over profiles of people who were known to have interacted with the vigilante. The people Daredevil had beaten up went in one (digital) pile, the people he rescued in another. He'd get P.I.'s to do follow-ups with any of them willing to talk, and keep tabs on the ones Daredevil might try to contact again. He created a third pile for people who fit in neither category, people who Daredevil had contacted for other reasons.

Brett Mahoney was at the top of that list, but after a little digging into the Fisk mess, Tony found a small, recently failed law firm had received information directly from the vigilante. The firm, Nelson and Murdock, were linked to Mahoney, and to Karen Page, a woman the Devil had rescued from an assassin, after she exposed part of Fisk's money laundering operation. Tony had already determined none of the four could be Daredevil, due to pigmentation, gender, a beer gut, and blindness, but he thought if he put them under surveillance, Mahoney in particular, they might lead him to the Devil's day job.

He knew it was possible that the Devil was homeless, or at least nomadic, but he had to eat, and he had to get that goofy armor from somewhere. The guy didn't steal from the people he beat up, as evidenced by large piles of cash found on or near his criminal victims. He supposed the vigilante could have been independently wealthy, but the hobo clothes he'd worn while rescuing Laura and Lila Barton left Tony unconvinced.

Tony thought Nelson and Murdock might have been supporting the Devil, since in general, lawyers have extra spending money. The firm also had a pro-vigilante bent, since they had defended the Punisher pro bono. That theory sank like a stone when he dug into the firm's financial records.

Most of their clients had been impoverished or nearly so. According to their tax records, they had accepted payment in baked goods and casseroles. They barely made enough to pay their rent, much less support a vigilante mascot. It was more their total lack of business sense, rather than the Punisher case that drove them under. He left the two lawyers on his surveillance list anyway. Maybe the Devil worked for baked goods, too.

Tony also ordered a few hundred extra cameras to put up around Hell's Kitchen, figuring he could get better results from facial recognition if he had better quality video. He might get lucky and spot the Devil sans mask as well. He sent the purchase and contract orders down to the head of Stark Industries security. He knew Pepper would get a copy as well. She hadn't complained about him having Laura and Lila Barton followed, but he held out hope she'd stop by to complain about this.

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Matt Murdock sat with his head resting on the kitchen table. All around him lay papers from his P.O. Box. He had forwarded the law office's mail to it after he shut the doors for good, but that morning the post office called, complaining that it was full again. He thought with the office closed, and all the bills settled, the amount of mail would taper off. He had been wrong.

With Frank Castle in the wind, people apparently needed somewhere to send their hate mail. There could be fan mail as well. Matt didn't want to open it and find out who thought Frank's murder spree was the best thing ever. He was still twisting with guilt for not stopping Frank, and for thinking Frank was even a little bit right.

Matt could tell from the smell that some of the mail had been forwarded from Rikers Island, where the crime lord Matt had helped put away was growing his influence. He was sure Wilson Fisk was behind the letters being sent to him, instead of to the police.

 _Confronting Fisk at Rikers was the stupidest thing I have ever done_ , Matt thought.

He tried to push Fisk's threats out of his head. He tried to focus on sorting.

Anything really leaky, the post office just threw away, but sometimes envelopes with powdered substances still got put in the box. He thought it was mostly baking soda or talcum powder, intended to scare, but a few had a strange chemical tang to their scents. The smell also told him a few letters had been exposed to bodily substances, spit being the least offensive. He considered calling the police, but decided to just double-bag the dangerous or disgusting letters before throwing them out.

Matt sorted out the envelopes addressed solely to Franklin Nelson. The letters with inkjet labels instead of handwritten indents were hard to figure out, but if he left them in the sun for a few minutes, he could feel the difference between the light-absorbing black ink and the cooler reflective white paper around it. There was hate mail for Foggy too, since Matt left him with Frank's defense for the most part. The idea of people sending Foggy hate mail made Matt's chest hurt.

Once he had made three neat piles, he felt stuck. He was pretty sure Frank would not give a shit about his mail. He wondered if Foggy would be mad if he threw Frank's out. Matt didn't think he wanted it, but he might be upset if Matt threw it away without asking. He had to give Foggy his mail, anyway. He could ask. He could call to find out, but even thinking about Foggy's number sapped what little energy he had left.

As Daredevil, he'd spent most of the night searching for a teenage girl chained up in a van, after he heard a man bragging about paying a pimp to have sex with her. Matt had broken all the man's fingers, but the only information he got was the name of another man who knew the time and the street address where the van would arrive. Matt found the second man, but the van was long gone, driven back across the bridge into Jersey carrying another person Matt had failed to save.

It was another one of those days where he could do nothing right.

He let go of his control, letting the layers he had built up fly apart. He wasn't meditating. He was doing the opposite, wallowing in the painful flood of sound.

"-every time-it's your dog- _they caaaaaall the Riiiiising Sun!-_ CHOCK! CHOCK! CHOCK!-didn't sign it- Lisa doesn't even like him- necesito mas!- _woke up from his coma-_ at the office- dumbass can't find it _\- lilbaye hdha al'usbue-_ Twenty dollars? – _Up in here, up in here!-_ Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroom! VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOM! SKREEEEEECH! – extra onions! – no but they didn't get there- parkean oinex- no mom! It's his fault- three floors- not plugged in- Shangban chidao!- _can solve your problems until you're honest with yourself_ -ek naee shart- Drip! Drop! Drip! Drop! Drip! Drop!- the president can't be that - _the fat pours right off!-_ non e possible ottenere- the blind guy! He's just lying there- _"_

Matt glared at nothing. He couldn't even mope in peace. He concentrated again and built the layers back, narrowing his focus until he located the conversation. The voice was male, and not particularly loud, but Matt was called "blind guy" as often as his own name, so the phrase usually caught his attention. Eventually he put the world in enough order to pinpoint the voice, apparently having a discussion about him, over on the rooftop next door.

"-he could be dead or something," a man with a deviated septum was rambling. "There's no point in setting up the cameras if he's dead."

"He's not dead," a second, raspier voice said. "He's asleep. You can see he's breathing."

"I can't," Rambler said.

"Use the zoom," Raspy said.

Matt fought the urge to move. He was used to being stared at, but that was out in public spaces. He hadn't ever bothered with curtains on his windows because he was on the top floor, and Foggy had told him the glass was neither clean, nor particularly clear. Apparently it was clear enough for two strangers to see and film him through.

Matt heard tools clanking in a bag. The zip and swish as the men moved their arms probably meant they wore polyester windbreakers, maybe with a cable or phone company logo as cover. He tried to think of who would be watching him. Members of the Hand had tracked him home once, but they didn't seem the type to hire such…verbose help. The Hand would know better than to chat while spying on him. He could only think of one other person who would bother setting up surveillance: Wilson Fisk.

" _I will dismantle the lives of the two amateurs that put me in here,"_ Fisk had said.

This could be the first part of that plan. Matt didn't recognize Raspy or Rambler as criminals he'd beaten up, or even men on the periphery of Fisk's operations, but Fisk would need new employees after the FBI took down the majority of his organization.

The men's breathing was steady, but not unusually deep. Rambler had eaten something disagreeable and his stomach was roiling, almost masking the sound of his heart. Their belts strained against their bellies as they leaned over to sort out gear, and Raspy's knees creaked. They were not trained fighters. Matt shifted slightly, adjusting his arms to better support his head. He heard the faint uptick in the heartbeat of the one he'd dubbed Rambler.

"Ok. He's alive," Rambler said.

"Great. Give me the drill."

He listed as the two men installed something next to one of the satellite dishes on the other side of the alley. He couldn't hear anything from the device they installed, so he could not tell if it was turned on or not. He fixed the location in his mental map so he could avoid or destroy it.

"Test the signal," Raspy ordered.

Something clicked, followed by the muted tap of fingers on a touchscreen, rather than a keyboard.

"It's clear," Rambler said. His boots scraped in gravel and tools rattled again. "Camera on the front door is good, too."

 _Damn it_ , Matt thought. He would not have noticed the camera they had just installed if they hadn't been talking about it. Finding one pointing at the front of his building would be difficult, and avoiding detection while searching for a camera among other electronic devices would be almost impossible.

"Is there a back way out?" Raspy asked.

"Yeah, it's a service exit," Rambler said. "We can cover it from the end of this roof, or the roof across the street, but the super for that building might spot them. Also more stairs to get there."

"This roof, then," Raspy said.

"He's still just lying there," Rambler said. "Maybe he's in a coma."

"Would you stop?"

"It's just weird, watching a blind guy. It's like watching a kid or something. It's creepy."

"He doesn't care about the blind guy," Raspy growled. "This is just covering all the bases. If he's gonna show up anywhere, it'll be at the reporter's place."

That brought Matt up short. If they didn't care about him, could they be after Daredevil? His fingers brushed against the piles of hate mail. It was more likely they were looking for Frank Castle. They might be law enforcement, or just some P.I.s trying to make a name for themselves. That didn't rule out Fisk's involvement, since Matt doubted all of the crime lord's moles in law enforcement had been caught.

He had to figure out who they worked for before making his next move. But he wanted to gather information without confronting the two spies, or giving away his abilities to whomever was getting the camera feeds. Following them home would be hard, since he'd have to get past their surveillance to do it. Also, if he followed them as Daredevil, and was noticed, he'd basically be throwing evidence in their laps.

The two men were quieter as they installed the second camera to observe his apartment building's back door. He supposed there was another way to gather information. He could do something to provoke a reaction and hopefully keep his observers talking. He considered falling down in his kitchen while they watched, but that didn't seem dramatic enough. Something had to go so sideways that they had to call their boss.

Matt fought down embarrassment and preemptive guilt.

He got to his feet and shuffled across the room. He was glad he had bothered to put on a long-sleeved shirt, since he wasn't sure if the cameras could pick up his scars. He walked up the stairs to the roof, and opened the door. The quality of sounds changed slightly, without bricks, glass, and wood in the way. Gravel slipped and rolled under his bare feet. Bits of filth stuck to the soles.

"Oh, shit!" Rambler said.

"What?" Raspy asked.

A hand slapped a shoulder, and an arm cut through the air, pointing.

Matt heard both their hearts speed up as he walked across the roof to the rear of the building. The building behind his apartment was thirty feet away. The space between his roof and the building where the men stood was only twenty.

"He can't see us," Raspy whispered.

Matt was fairly certain even a normal person would have heard that comment, but he pretended he didn't. He got to the raised edge of the roof, and climbed onto it, standing with his toes over the empty space. Bits of gravel that had stuck to his feet fell into the gap and the sound of the tiny rocks hitting the ground reflected back and forth between the buildings. His observers' heartbeats picked up again, Rambler's more than Raspy's.

"Shit. Shit! He's gonna jump," Rambler whispered. "Call Sihn! No, 911!"

"The contract said 'don't interact'," Raspy said.

"Fuck that!" Rambler hissed, clearing his throat nervously. "Hey! Hey Mr. Mur- Mister…sir!?"

Matt turned in their direction, pretending to be startled. Raspy was dialing as his partner spoke. There were far too many digits for it to be 911.

"You're kind of close to the edge," Rambler called. "Do you need help?"

"No! No, thank you," Matt called back. "I'm fine."

"Get me Sihn," Raspy whispered into his phone. "No, I can't hold. It's the new contract. We're doing install, and the subject's about to off himself."

"Please get back a little…um…sir. It's …ah…dangerous," Rambler called.

Matt slowly turned, putting his back to the six-story drop. With slow, careful movements he got off the ledge and put his feet back in the gravel. Rambler's heart was still racing. He hoped the man hadn't lost a family member this way.

"Mister…you seem…not ok…you want me to…call someone for you?" Rambler asked.

"I'm fine," Matt called back. "Everything's fine."

He shuffled back to the roof entrance. Once he had the door closed, he sat on the stairs to the roof, listening to Raspy argue with his boss about their "suicidal" subject, while Rambler paced and muttered about calling social services. Pity wasn't something Matt wanted, but it was kind of a relief that there were still people out there who cared about strangers in any way at all.

"No," Raspy said into his phone as Matt focused on the slightly distorted reply.

" _Is he still outside?"_

"No. And we can't see him on the cameras, either."

 _"Do you think he'll attempt suicide again?"_

"I don't know. I catch cheaters and people drinking on the job. I'm not a damn psychiatrist!"

 _"I'm having Lee put in a call, but I wouldn't bet on Stark getting back to us today. I don't want to call in the cops. If this guy is in a psych ward, the Daredevil probably won't pop in for a visit."_

 _Not cops hunting the Punisher,_ Matt thought. _Worse than that. Better than Fisk, but worse than that_. _Still all my fault, though._

Matt hadn't really expected his warning to Stark to be the end of it, but he thought it would, at worst, result in an extra warrant for the arrest of his alter ego. He didn't do anything the government gave a damn about, because he only helped people that no one else gave a damn about.

He did not in any way regret rescuing Laura and Lila Barton, but he really wished he hadn't gotten involved as Daredevil afterward. If he hadn't dragged those two mercenaries to the police station, he never would have crossed paths with an Avenger. He didn't know why he bothered to warn Stark when he heard him in the police station and realized he was ill. Stark was a billionaire. He probably had a checkup with a panel of experts every night before going to bed. He didn't need Matt's warning.

Matt put his head in his hands.

More than a year ago, Foggy had found Matt bleeding out on the floor of his apartment, in his old disguise, and found out he was Daredevil under the worst possible circumstances. Foggy had screamed at Matt about the consequences of Matt being revealed as Daredevil, the completely obvious, completely foreseeable consequences.

Every case he worked on would be questioned. He'd lose his license and he might get Foggy disbarred as well. Matt would go to prison, the same prison Fisk was held in. He'd get Foggy and Karen on the shit list of every criminal in Hell's Kitchen, and negative attention from the media as well. It wouldn't matter if Stark arrested him or just outed him. He would ruin the lives of the last two people on the planet that he loved.

Matt took a shaky breath, and then a deeper one. He wasn't caught yet.

Stark, or more likely Stark's hired help, had linked Matt to Daredevil, probably through police records. Matt and Foggy had represented a crooked cop who turned state's evidence against Fisk, after Daredevil saved said crooked cop from Fisk's other crooked cops. He and Foggy were only peripherally linked to Daredevil. Raspy had mentioned a reporter, which Matt would bet good money meant Karen Page, Matt's former secretary turned Bulletin journalist. She had been rescued by Daredevil several times as far as the police knew.

Matt forced his body to relax.

Stark probably only knew what the police knew. Matt just had to keep him from learning more. He just had to worry about the cameras.

Matt couldn't break the cameras as Daredevil. If Matt 'accidentally' found them and reported them, he didn't have the resources to prove they were Stark's. If he did find proof and tried to take Stark to court, he'd be facing an army of lawyers, and that was if the case even got to court before Matt died of old age. He couldn't think of a way to get rid of the cameras that wouldn't incriminate himself. He would just have to be where the cameras weren't.

He couldn't just keep his armor in a gym bag and change somewhere else in the city. If people were monitoring him, they could probably put together Matt Murdock leaving home with Daredevil showing up. His "I was home asleep" alibi would not work if video footage showed he wasn't home at all.

He would have to give up his home.

He couldn't just move either, since Stark could probably track him through the credit checks a new landlord would run. He would have to get off the grid. While searching the sewers, he had found a few places that would be liveable with a little work. He could shower at Fogwell's Gym. He had a couple grand in cash stuffed in his trunk along with his armor. He had meant to give it to his armorer, Melvin Potter, to pay for material for repairs. He could put that off for a while, and use the cash for food instead.

Matt paid his rent and utilities with automatic withdrawals from his savings account, and that would last for a few months. Stark might lose interest in that time, or get caught spying on someone else, and then Matt could come back. He would just have to rough it until then.

Matt's chest was getting tight again. He knew the feeling was stupid. His apartment was just a place. 'Home' was supposed to be about people, not bricks and boards or geography. He didn't have any people at the moment. Maybe that was why it was so hard to let the place go.

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 **Author's note:** I ended it on an angst, I know. Feel free to review!


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